Travelling to the UK: "Don't go there!

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From today's Guardian, pages 54, 55, 56 and 57:

Don't go there!
The new Rough Guide to Britain warns that Buckingham Palace is ?'bland' and an ?'anti-climax'. But it's not the only tourist attraction that fails to live up to the hype. Here 12 Guardian writers pick their least favourite days out:

Stonehenge, Wiltshire

Sam Wollaston

The main problem is that they made it too small. "Bloody hell, is that it?" said my travelling companion recently, as we drove along the A303. "It's like a miniature model of Stonehenge."

Pyramids, temples, famous people, they're always disappointingly small, but Stonehenge is especially so, I think, because of pictures in schoolbooks of hairy dudes hauling massive rocks along on tree-trunk rollers.

The problem used to be surmountable, because wandering among the stones, they did indeed seem massive. And there was a magic about the place ?- you could touch the same cold stone the hairy dudes touched more than 5,000 years ago, admire the beautiful lichen, feel the power. Not any more though, unless you're a druid, an official modern-day hairy dude.

I know it's for all the right reasons that visitors aren't allowed among the stones, but looking at it from behind a fence, with a bunch of scary-looking guards making sure you don't make a run for it, is not the same. It's the difference between seeing an animal in the wild and an animal at the zoo.

Oh, and the noise of all that traffic doesn't really help either.

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Tate Modern, London

Stuart Jeffries

It's the ramp. Every time I walk down Tate Modern's ramp, my spirits descend with me. Like Orpheus, I hope to climb out of this underworld with something special, but I usually come out with a migraine. And even though I have seen some terrific things (Juan Munoz's installation Double Bind, for example), it's always a relief to leave. Last week I went to see the rehang and had to dive into the calm of the Rothko room to get away from the blank-eyed tourists and their elbows.

Nowhere in London is the hand of tourism so asphyxiatingly wrapped around the throat of art. But Tate Modern isn't just a victim of its own success. The ramp is designed for Brobdingnagian giants, not humans; the escalators whisk you through gloom; the blackwood everywhere is oppressive.

Why do I keep going back? Perhaps because I ought to like it. It's the most successful of London's Millennium projects and it has, at a stroke, reversed the capital's laughable reputation for displaying modern art. More importantly, it is free ?- unlike London Zoo (£14!) or Kew Gardens (£11.75!).

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John O'Groats, Scotland

Luke Waterson

The most north-easterly point of Britain is difficult to get to and, when you get there, it's hard to feel it was really worth the bother. Mile after mile of peat bog brings you to scatterings of grey and white houses standing upon yet more peat bog, but with the extra delight of grey North Sea rollers to gaze upon.

There's a shopping arcade, a sign telling you how far you are from anywhere interesting, and the First and Last House, a hut selling postcards showing the village in hard-to-imagine sunlight. And that's about it. On the upside, it's not as tacky as Land's End. But then at least Land's End sometimes has good weather.

Once you've been photographed by the sign, the best thing to do is to quickly hop on the passenger ferry to Orkney, and put the whole experience behind you.

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London Eye, London

Paul Howlett

Granted, it looks fabulous, but as a daytrip with the kids? Forget it. First there's the queue, stretching off down the South Bank. Then there are the sky-high prices ?- £15 for adults, £7.50 for children, or if you're a Russian magnate or something you can pay £25 a head (kids too!), for a queue-busting fast-track ticket.

But never mind. Once you've stepped into one of those glassy pods, you're going to forget the investment in time and money and enjoy the "thrilling experience of a flight on the Eye", as British Airways puts it. Except of course it's not a flight. You go up, and you come down half an hour later, exactly where you started. And because the revolution is so grindingly slow, each minute lasts about half an hour in child-time. There are only so many times you can say: "Look at Big Ben down there!" in wonderment before it loses some of its novelty value.

So 10 minutes in, the children are slumped listless and bored on the bench in the centre of the overheated pod, asking: "Are we nearly there yet?"

Now compare that to Christopher Wren's marvellous monument to the Great Fire of London, a little way down river. It's £2 for adults, £1 for children, and at 202ft has similarly fantastic views, plus 311 childexhausting steps up, 311 down. Sorted.

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The Tales of Robin Hood, Nottingham

Michael Hann

In what appears to be a converted shopping centre in the heart of Nottingham ?- forgive me if the details are inexact; I have tried to wipe my mind blank of them ?- lurks "a world of mystery and merriment, where legend and adventure lives on". The Tales of Robin Hood costs £7.95 for adults, £5.95 for kids and a couple of quid for toddlers, which by my reckoning means that my family were entertained at a cost of around £1.50 per minute. As my daughter said on the way out: "I don't know whether that was scary or boring, daddy. But it was one of them."

The thrilling heart of the experience is a chairlift ride ?- the "Travel Back in Time Adventure Ride" ?- around what purports to be a recreation of medieval Nottingham. It is carved roughly from wood, and by "roughly", I don't mean rustic and wholesome. I mean approximate. As you pass through, recordings of medieval folk in conversation play around you. Unfortunately ?- doubtless the result of medieval recording technology ?- they are unintelligible. The result is that you have no idea what you've been looking at. "Adventure", I fear, is rather overstating this ride's merits.

Incredibly, the management roped in a member of the royal family to open it. Can't remember who, but it's that kind of pimping of the royal brand, Your Maj, that has brought your family into disrepute.

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Eden Project, Cornwall

Emily Wilson
When you first catch a glimpse of those domes looming up from the quarry pits you think, wow! Space age! But that's the best bit, that first glimpse.

After that you get to an Ikea-style car park, then you pay £13.80 for the privilege of entering what appears to be a giant garden centre. Except it's not as good as a garden centre, because you can't buy everything you see.

There are lots of flowerbeds whichever way you look, and the domes in the distance. You set off hopefully towards the domes, but when you get there, you realise they're just greenhouses. Jolly big greenhouses. One of them has lots of herbs in it ?- a bit like the herbs in my back garden. The other dome is hot and has lots of tropical plants in it. It's quite good, the hot dome ?- but you wouldn't pay £13.80 to see it.

Basically the whole place is a big zoo for plants, and that's great if you really like plants. But if you're only averagely keen on them, well, brace yourself for a world of disappointment. The shop's good, and the cafe's OK, but how Cornwall gets away with promoting the place as a world-class tourist attraction is a proper world-class mystery.

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Edinburgh Castle

Helen Pidd

As any six-year-old with a crayon will show you, castles have jagged turrets, imposing ramparts, and a moat. Lacklustre turrets aside, Edinburgh's fortress looks so un-castlelike that tourists (usually American) drain the patience of locals by constantly asking where "Edinboro cassel" is. The answer, inevitably, is "over there", for it is slap-bang in the middle of town. This is just one reason to despise this crime against imagination. There are many more. Like the outrageous £10.30 entrance fee. Or the Stone of Destiny ?- Scotland's coronation stone ?-which is just a microwavesized grey slab. Or the Elizabeth Duke-style cheapness of the Scottish crown jewels. The doggy graveyard, where military mutts are laid to rest, is cute, and the cannons are fun, but you wouldn't pay a tenner for the pleasure.

Why not visit the Royal Museum instead? It's free to get in, the Millennium clock in the main hall is way more exciting than the One O'Clock Gun fired at the castle, and there is a lovely view from the restaurant upstairs.

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Haworth, West Yorkshire

Martin Wainwright

If only the Brontës had had some talented neighbours ?- that's all I can say after staggering back from the cobbles of Haworth with everything from Emily pot-pourri to easy payment terms for a Brontë Sunbed. Never, has a birthplace gone so overboard about its first family. Charlotte wrote as early as 1850 about sightseers coming "boring to Haworth" as if they were weevils. It's a cliche of a comparison, but they have swollen to an army of ants.

There just isn't room. The Parsonage has fine things to show but too often it's just a queue. The walk to the waterfalls is like a crocodile outing from school. The whole point of Emily's moors was their wild freedom, but the signs (in Japanese and English, so great is the power of this touro-magnet) point to one tried-n-tested clough, beck and ruin. The tours don't have time for any right to roam.

Parking is complicated and, though the steam train from Keighley is nice, it's crocodile time again for the hike to Brontëland. To cap it all a socking great windmill has been plonked on the neighbouring hillside. Why don't Thornton (the sisters' birthplace) and Cowan Bridge (home of their school) get their act together and divert some of the hordes?

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Madame Tussauds, London

Tim Dowling

I went to Madame Tussauds once in 1998, after I read that Augusto Pinochet always visited the famous wax museum whenever he came to London to buy arms. I had often seen the huge queues which seemed to be perpetually wrapped around the building, but on this particular afternoon it wasn't that busy. It seemed like a fun way to get inside the head of a murderous dictator.

Inside I found a group of eastern Europeans staring in perfect perplexity at a statue of Chris Evans. My bemusement more or less matched theirs. I wandered along the heavily trafficked carpet, looking at frozen TV celebs and world leaders and thinking, why does Pinochet like it here? Every tourist in the place wore the wan smile of someone gamely trying not to feel swindled.

It's hard to describe what's so horrible about Madam Tussauds. It's not just the stupidity of paying to see a waxen Tom Cruise, but the indignity of having to wait your turn. Not long ago I agreed to take my eldest son there, but when I saw the queue and the prices (a child's ticket is £18.99), I abandoned the idea and took him to the Soane Museum instead, which I loved and he hated, which is how it should be.

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Hampton Court, London

Zoe Williams

I'm going to tell you how much it costs to get into Hampton Court, even though that's not what I object to about it at all. It's £12.30 ?- I like that. I love the prissy precision of state ownership, and plus you'd pay more than that to get into Turnmills, and that's one of the seven stomachs of hell.

No, here are my objections: first, those great big walls round it make it look so exciting and then when they actually let you in it's like a herbal tea. Smells fantastic, doesn't taste of anything (apart from the fennel one, which tastes very strongly of fennel). And furthermore, what kind of attraction bills itself as "immaculately kept"? No, really ?- if you were trying to get someone to marry one of your children, would you call him "very clean. Nice haircut"? The rooms aren't much more impressive than places like Cliveden where you can actually stay, and call reception, and get people to bring you booze. And besides the chambers, the only point is the maze. For this to be a point, you'd have to think there was a point in the first place to the concept: "maze." Why? Why go in there if you can't get out? It's a hedge!

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Centre for Alternative Technology, Machynlleth, Wales

Steven Morris

We thought a visit to "Europe's leading ecocentre" would hit all the right buttons. Good for adults ?- quite interested in green issues ?- better for children who like hitting the right buttons on whizzy displays. When our son ran screaming from the gaping mouth of a giant mole, terrified by the dank gloom of the creature's stomach, we knew it was a mistake. To be fair, it was out of season and drizzling. But the people in Machynlleth had promised that there was fun to be had all year round.

There wasn't. Giant mole aside, the waterpowered railway was out of action, the play equipment was slippy and there was the sort of muddy, smokey mustiness you find at eco-warrior campsites. The only buttons to hit were on a display which made us feel guilty about how much energy we use at home. Mud and guilt ?- not a good combination for a great day out. The most depressing thing was that the centre didn't make you feel you'd like to make your life any greener, at least not in the winter. Maybe eco-living is only fun in the summer.

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Blackpool illuminations

Laura Barton

Blackpool illuminations are essentially a very long, well-lit traffic jam. However, this simple and rather tedious fact did not prevent thousands of us flocking to the beachside resort every bleeding year of my youth. The illuminatory season was traditionally heralded by the appearance of Stuart Hall on North West Tonight one autumn evening, to tell us what "delights" to expect on the sea-front that year.

The Lights were always switched on by a celebrity ?- in my memory, it is a perpetual rotation of Status Quo and Judith Chalmers, and the display would boast lights in the shape of My Little Pony, or Aladdin, or the cast of Coronation Street. The consistent theme, however, was that they were rubbish. Regardless, we would clamber into the family car, spend the next hour driving to the coast and then 162 years (approx) crawling along the front gazing up at giant illuminated hats and enormous wine glasses, and feeling not a little car sick. Sometimes you would go on a coach for a school outing, and then the experience was much the same, only one got to enjoy the fluorescent paraphernalia amid the smell of other people's sandwiches. It still baffles me that to this day some 3.5 million people willingly travel to Blackpool each year to stare vaguely at some trumped up fairy lights wrapped around a lamp post. Even if it is free.

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Stonehenge, Madame Tussauds, Blackpool - I couldn't agree more :wink:

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I haven't been to any of these places so I can't comment beyond saying that I really enjoyed reading each of these tales of tourist woe.

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Walter, you are such a subversive . . .

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That's a great compliment, Set, thanks - but honour to whom honour is due: thanks to the Guardian :wink:

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And thanks to Rough Guides..

I enjoyed all the comments, chuckled my way through the list..

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Thank you, Walter. I thoroughly agree that tourists should avoid the UK at all costs, especially in hot sunny weather when one wants to have a quiet stroll in the park, drive on empty roads or buy an ice cream.

If you DO insist on coming to the UK, please go and visit Glasgow or Edinburh, as they need the money and are very kind and welcoming.
Some parts of Scotland even have electricity, telephone and indoor toilets, so I hear.

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agree with Walter about Stonehenge. haven't experienced the others, but now i'm glad i passed up the London Eye. :wink: Tussaud's, i never even considered visiting.

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In all seriousness, I would just say that rip off tourist traps are rip off tourist traps, whatever country one may be visiting.

Personally, I avoid these things like the plague (apart from Hampton Court, as I think it's a great place).
A wise tourist will always do their research thoroughly, and head for unusual places that are off the beaten track. I know I do when visiting abroad.

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Travelling to the UK: "Don't go there!

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